IT and sustainable construction – 2

While I was writing yesterday’s post, an email discussion about the Draft Strategy had begun among Constructing Excellence ‘s Collaborative Working Champions (of which I am one of the latest tranche). I volunteered to start work on a paper to form part of a collective response to the consultation document (we have until 30 November to respond), and fellow blogger Martin Brown of Fairsnape dropped me a line with some of his initial ideas (and linked to my post from the Lancashire Construction Best Practice Club blog).

While my initial focus for the Expo event is deliberately quite pragmatic and short-term, I do intend to do a little future-gazing – and Martin supplied a wealth of ideas, including these nuggets:

• “the emergence and evolution of Web 2.0, and the planned Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 and the impact that will have on the built environment… virtual meetings with all stake-holders to a project, including academic and other experts, pushing the concept of early involvement.”
• “Accessing information today. … people in the industry need the information they want delivered; knowing that it is out there is not enough. Yet 99% of the industry do not know how to get it, so don’t.”
• “Carbon calculators… a big issue. … Contractors and clients need a construction process calculator (If you want to collaborate on developing one then great !) This will become vital – we do not have a benchmark level for the carbons we use on site to construct the building – so how can we know we are improving? Clients are increasingly asking for this information in bids. Just what is the carbon footprint of a construction site?”
• “FM – the move to virtual offices. Futurologists are in agreement that with a decade or so the corporate office will be mostly virtual, with a reduction in the fixed or real assets. What then the FM sector that is overly concerned with asset management? Will code become the new fm asset? Indeed will code become the new bricks and mortar?”